Pump the brakes: Raiders' trade for Carson Palmer wasn't nearly as bad as some claim

Yahoo! Sports | May 3

He sat at a podium and called it "the greatest trade in football," a calculated burst of hyperbole that would haunt him like a silver-and-black poltergeist.Now, 18 months after championing his team's costly, driven-by-desperation deal for Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer in the middle of the 2011 season, former Oakland Raiders coach Hue Jackson admits he'd like to take it back.

No, Jackson doesn't regret the organizational decision to send first- and second-round draft picks to the Bengals for the then-retired Palmer, a much-maligned transaction that officially ran its course last Friday when Cincinnati selected running back Gio Bernard with the 37th overall pick of the 2013 draft. Rather, the do-over Jackson desires is a retraction of that five-word statement accompanying Palmer's arrival in Oakland in October of 2011, a proclamation that many Raiders fans now regard as the ultimate irony."In hindsight, calling it 'the greatest trade in football' wasn't the best idea," says Jackson, now the Bengals' running backs coach and special assistant to head coach Marvin Lewis. "I shouldn't have said it. That's on me. Lesson learned. I'll file it away and I'll grow from it."I know why I said it – to let our players know that we're not done, that we've got a quarterback and we've got a chance. But if you say things like that and you don't win, it's going to come back to bite you in the butt."